These Guys’ $5K Spending Sprees Keep Your Games Free to Play

Photo illustration: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

It was a typical weekday night after work: Lee slipped off his shoes, climbed into bed with his iPad, and booted up Clash of Clans. The free-to-play strategy game, in which he went by the name “Metamorphaz,” had quickly become a favorite stress-reliever for him. After the game’s logo faded away, a sprawling virtual village popped into view.

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Uh oh. A rival player had gone aggressive, and one of Lee’s fellow “clan” members was under attack. Lee tapped a few icons, donating dozens of his troops to defend the friend from a brutal assault of archers and barbarians. Then, he pulled up Clash of Clan‘s built-in, real-money shop. While the game is free to download, its maker Supercell profits by selling virtual items to the most engaged players. Tonight, Lee’s iPad questioned him with a blue pop-up window: “Do you want to buy one Chest of Gems for $99.99?”

Lee could use those gems to immediately fortify his army. He tapped “Yes,” almost without thinking. In less than a month of playing around two hours a day, he’d spent nearly a thousand dollars.

Game developers have a word for players like Lee: whales.

“A whale is a player that is willing to invest a significant amount of money in your game,” said Jared Psigoda, CEO of the browser game publisher Reality Squared Games, at Game Developers Conference Europe in August. “For most publishers out there … a handful of players make up a significant percentage of revenue, specifically once you get into the mid-hard-core, free-to-play type model.”

“The top 10 percent of players can account for as much as 50 percent of all in-app purchase revenue,” says Andy Yang, CEO of the mobile monetization research firm PlayHaven.

So who are these people?

Lee — who asked that we not share his full name, or any specific details about his line of work — is a single, 42-year-old businessman from California. He says that his annual income is “in the six figures.”

Lee says that spending money on games like Clash of Clans is actually saving him money in the long-run: Before he started gaming, he says he and a small group of friends would go out drinking, sometimes spending as much as $6,000 in a single night between them.

Lee stopped spending money on drinking roughly around the same time that he began playing Happy Kingdom, a Facebook game, with some friends. It was the first videogame he’d ever liked, and he became enraptured. He wound up spending nearly $5,000 in that game before trading it for Clash of Clans, but says that’s far less than what he would have otherwise spent on alcohol.

“I actually save money playing these games instead of going out and drinking,” he said.

You may never have heard of Clash of Clans, but it’s one of the highest-grossing games on the App Store thanks to players like Lee. (Supercell did not return Wired’s requests for comment.) In researching the spending habits of Clash of Clans players, delving into the official Supercell forums and starting a thread asking players about their spending habits, I kept coming across the username “Panda.”

He, too, declined to reveal his real name to Wired. But “Panda” jumped into the thread almost immediately to brag about how much money he had poured into the game. He’s one of the top 10 Clash of Clans players in the world, and he’s paid for it. In just over a month, “Panda” said he has put over $7,000 into his Clans village. He has no regrets, claiming that the money accounts for around 7 percent of his total monthly income.

“You don’t have to spend less, you have to earn more,” he advised other players.

Other Clans players don’t approve of players like Panda. “You are buying your way to the top of the leaderboard with no gaming skill required,” one player said. “Just how long are you gonna be able to sustain [$7,000] a month for?”

Lee says that members of his own clan also disapprove of his spending habits. But Lee says he just wants to be a good teammate. He’s not interested in topping the leaderboards, but loves the feeling of sending his highly leveled troops to help out his fellow clan members.

PlayHaven’s Yang doesn’t think developers of games like Clash of Clans should lose sleep about having users that pay thousands of dollars for in-app consumables.

“That’s like saying a band should feel guilty for having hardcore fans that have spend money purchasing every album, every piece of memorabilia, and religiously attending all of their concerts,” he said.

But Lee’s and Panda’s four-figure expenditures are dwarfed by whales in even more lucrative games.

Vince P., who also asked us to withhold his last name, has been playing the Facebook game Battle Pirates since early 2011. His total spend: over $16,000.

“It does kind of shock me, for sure, that it was that much,” said Vince, who goes by the username “Spoon” in Battle Pirates. “And it’s all for nothing.”

Vince is 45 years old, divorced, with a 16-year-old daughter. He says he makes between $200,000 and $400,000 annually. He looked positively distraught over the situation during a Skype interview with Wired, as he tabulated a list of his receipts. On Dec. 17, 2011 alone, he spent $207. Just two days later, he spent another $415. Later, in a single week in February, he put $700 into the game.

Before downloading that list and doing the math, Vince estimated that he had spent a total of $5,000. That he had spent triple that number seemed to disturb him greatly. He recalled one specific moment from a day at the height of his Battle Pirates addiction, when he was discussing preparing for an in-game tournament with a friend he’d met through the game. Vince and his friend were discussing whether or not to spend $500 on a fleet of ships to position themselves to win the tournament.

“We were seriously talking about dropping $500 on nothing,” he says with a sigh. “It’s a piece of software that doesn’t even exist in real life. It could just evaporate into nothing.”

Vince was at one point in the top 100 leaderboard on Battle Pirates. For him, that justified the big cash outlays.

“You want to be the top guy,” Vince says. “Once you convince yourself to spend two hundred dollars on it, another two hundred dollars isn’t that much more.”

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